Milk Money (1994)

August 31, 1994

FILM REVIEW: MILK MONEY;
A Hooker Who Yearns For the Simple Life, And Finds a Simpleton

By JANET MASLIN

Published: August 31, 1994

For 10 sniggery minutes, "Milk Money" actually has something to do with pre-adolescent sexuality. It tells what happens when three sex-obsessed junior high school boys pool their money to raise $100, which they plan to pay some woman -- any woman -- for taking off her clothes.

In search of a candidate, they bicycle from their suburb to a nearby city, their faces flushed with the thrill of adventure. Richard Benjamin, laboring under the idea that this is an enchanting premise, directs such episodes as if he were Norman Rockwell in a trenchcoat.

Let's not sprain anything, although the screenwriter (John Mattson) may have, explaining how the boys happen to meet V (Melanie Griffith). She's a prostitute who happens to need $100 in the worst way. So V is easily persuaded to display brief, partial nudity, which is not shown on camera. What the audience does see is wide-eyed little Frank (Michael Patrick Carter) chomping corn chips as V, whose back is to the audience, prepares to drop the top of her dress. Frank finally doesn't look, and he doesn't have to. As it turns out, the movie's naughtiness was only a plot device to throw Frank and V together. It is gone right after this.

"Milk Money" may be the first brainless American comedy that deserves to be remade by the French, if only because Gallic sophistication about sex would be so much more welcome than Hollywood coyness. After all, there comes a point in this story where Frank tells V, "And don't take your clothes off for money!"

What makes Frank turn puritan? The fact that he decides V would make a good wife for his widowed dad (Ed Harris). Accordingly, he tells his father that V is a math tutor, which leads Dad into unwitting double-entendres like: "Frank was telling me what you do. Do you enjoy it?" Or: "I would teach him" -- Frank -- "myself, but I'm way out of practice."

V, who shortened her name from Eve "because it sounded too biblical," is a movie prostitute. This is not the same thing as a woman who actually takes money for sexual favors. V is seen with only a single client, and the closest she comes to having sex with him is sitting in the back of his car, feeding him chocolate-dipped strawberries and calling him "Big Boy." Instead, she's a dreamer, the sort who secretly yearns for a simpler life and enjoys being told she resembles Grace Kelly. The movie actually manages to lob Kelly-related compliments at V on a regular basis.

As V begins cleaning up her act, she begins dressing up in the flowered frocks that belonged to Frank's mother, charming Dad and leaving her past behind. What past? This film is so darned open-minded that Frank is able to deliver this homily: "Dad, you always say it's not what you do, it's who you are."

The film may try to renounce its own tawdriness, but not Ms. Griffith; she brings a certain irrepressible gusto to her role. Among the few genuinely amusing scenes here are those that show her flouncing through the small town where Frank and Dad live, scandalizing the locals and even finding one ex-client strolling with his wife on Main Street.

Like any good movie prostitute, she wears precisely the right costume for such occasions. It's skimpy but not truly cheap, and it's hot enough to excite the fashion sense of local pre-teen girls. "Milk Money" seems to think a stray hooker would fascinate and charm them, even when she's used by a proud Frank as an exhibit in biology class.

Mr. Harris manages to be improbably charming, despite the fact that his character, an amateur ecologist, is presented as one of the dimmest creatures ever to crawl out of the tide pool. This film's ending, which allows V to indulge her own heretofore-unknown ecological interests, deserves comparison with the last moments of "Indecent Proposal," a much more entertaining neo-prostitution tale. Philanthropy in such stories is a favorite way of encouraging viewers to forget what they're really about.